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15 Ways You Can Leverage Content for Online Lead Generation

Nothing is more frustrating than coming up with a great idea for a content piece, spending the time and resources creating it, and ultimately seeing little traction after launch. But don't become discouraged. Content marketing tools and tactics are continuously evolving, allowing you to repurpose and repackage your content time and time again.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through the numerous of ways you can take a piece of average content and turn it into lead-generation machine by leveraging different tools, platforms and formats.

Using Content for Online Lead Generation 101

At New Breed, we have a standard process for launching and promoting our latest content piece, be it a blog post, webinar or e-book. I’d highly advise adopting the same strategy to get you started, if you haven’t already. While I’m not going to spend time diving into the planning and creation elements of remarkable content, it’s important for me to note that you must spend adequate time planning before creating. If you don’t, your content will fall flat, and leveraging the following strategies will be 10 times harder.

Back to our basic promotion process. It’s important to create the following fundamental promotional assets to accompany your content.

Email: This could be a subscription email, notifying recipients of a new blog post, or an email introducing your latest content offer.

Social-media posts: Promote from various social networks with appropriate messaging for each platform. These posts should come from your company accounts as well as your employees.

Blog post: Unless it’s a blog post to begin with, any content offer should have a corresponding blog post with it. Not only does this increase the visibility of the offer, it adds another piece of content to your arsenal for lead engagement and qualification. Here’s an example.

Call to action: With every content offer we publish, we create a corresponding CTA to add to the end of related blog posts. The CTA employs the same branding of the offer and directs you to the landing page for that offer.

Amplify your Content with these 15 Online Lead Generation Tactics

Taking the basic promotion process a step further, I’ve scoured the Internet for innovative ways to leverage current and new channels for effective online lead generation. Go through the list and pick a handful of strategies that pique your interest and are manageable. It’s important to keep your time, size and skills in mind so as not to place unreasonable expectations on the strategies. Some of these ideas are easy to implement, while others take time and resources to execute.

Facebook

1. Change your cover photo to a branded image for the piece of content you just launched. Additionally, a few months back Facebook introduced a call-to-action button on the cover image. By combining an offer-specific cover photo that incorporates the CTA button, you can drive significantly more traffic to your website while increasing the probability of generating leads.

2. If you posted on Facebook about your latest content offer, pin that particular post to the top of your timeline. Then it’s the first post visitors will see when they arrive on the page, increasing the likelihood of click-through. Be sure to include a link to the landing page for the offer.

Twitter

3. Follow Facebook’s lead by uploading a branded cover photo promoting the particular content offer, as well as pinning a relevant tweet about the offer with a link to the landing page. Check out how Salesforce is promoting its annual conference, Dreamforce.

4.Create a hashtag specific to the content campaign you’re running. Therefore you can stay in tune with the conversation about the content and answer any questions related to it. Additionally, you can hold a Twitter chat Q&A about the content offer, or the main idea associated with it. For example, a Twitter chat around this post would focus on challenges with content creation and promotion in relation to lead generation.

5. Use Twitter lead-generation cards. These allow you to attach a sign-up form to any tweet with a CTA and image, so people can sign up or request an offer without ever leaving Twitter. You can decided between a standard or a promoted tweet—standard tweets are sent to your followers for free, while promoted tweets are sent to a targeted audience at a chosen price.

LinkedIn

6. LinkedIn is the best place for B2B companies to generate qualified leads, and one of the most effective ways to do so is by joining groups and actively engaging in discussions. Taking it a step further, you could be the one to begin a discussion—but keep in mind, LinkedIn is a space for professionals to carry on valuable and meaningful conversations. Don’t post links to your content everywhere, it comes across as spammy and ultimately decreases the likeliness of someone becoming a lead (or even engaging with your content).

7. Instead, pose a discussion question related to your content in a relevant group. In other words, don’t post your content. First, foster a lively conversation, after a few days check back and if people’s interests are piqued, mention that you have a piece of related content. At this time you can share the link to your content, but only post if you feel like you’ll be adding value.

SlideShare

Turn your content offer into a PowerPoint presentation, or upload your PDF to SlideShare. While you increase the likelihood of your content being found in search, it can be embedded on your own site pages and blog posts. The important elements to remember and incorporate into your content are:

8. You can include links within the description that direct viewers to the offer’s landing page.

9. You can include live links within the presentation with specific CTAs. If you include live links, be sure to center them on the sides because SlideShare reserves the left and right areas for people to click forward and backward. It also doesn’t allow any links in the first three slides.

10. With the paid version, you can include opt-in forms within the presentation.

11. Disable the option for viewers to download your presentation as a PDF. This way, their only option to get more information is to follow the CTA to your opt-in form.

Video

Repurpose your content offer by transforming it into a video is a great way to generate more leads online. There are a number of different ways to leverage videos, such as YouTube or Vimeo, social-media platforms, embedding them on your website via Wistia and more. Brendan Cournoyer of Brainshark points out that some studies show that simply including the world ‘video’ in an email subject line can increase CTR by more than 7 percent.

12. Here are some of the ways you can utilize video:

Short video teasers for a new product or service in relation to your content offer

Repurpose live webinars into on-demand videos that require registration

Your Website

Don’t neglect your website when looking for ways to promote new offers and generate leads. It is your best sales rep. There are so many ways to manipulate your site to highlight your content offer, but here are just a few that are easy to implement:

13. Create a CTA on your homepage or log-in screen. Your homepage is most likely the highest-trafficked page on your site, so take advantage of this.

14. If you’re consistently creating content offers, building a content library to house them all is a great way to stay organized and offer your best content in one place.

Quora

15. Quora and other forum-like websites are awesome for generating traffic and leads. To be successful, you have to answer questions consistently. The more questions you answer, the more potential your traffic has to compound. Here’s how to do it:

Create an account on Quora and beef up your profile with proof about what you know, what you have experience with, your interests and more.

Use the search bar and enter a keyword or phrase most related to your piece of content. Try different keywords for greater reach.

Then, provide unique and in-depth answers to people’s questions while including a link to your content as the next place for readers to get more information.

There are so many more ways to leverage your content for lead generation. Take the time to incorporate a few of these ideas into the promotion of your next premium content offer—they’re guaranteed to generate more leads.

What challenges do you face when it comes to lead generation? We’d love to hear.

About The Author

Olivia is an Inbound Marketing Strategist with a focus on lead generation and marketing + sales alignment. She's a rockstar at helping our customers build their HubSpot database and marketing processes while coming up with fresh ideas to generate qualified site traffic and leads. Her main goal is to help both customers and New Breed reach their marketing and revenue goals.